(Courtesy of Cashill Newsletter - March 14, 2004)

By Jack Cashill

On Friday, February 25, a mixed race jury in Albany, New York cleared four white officers of murder charges in the inarguably tragic death of African immigrant, Amadou Diallo. As protestors angrily shout "no justice, no peace" in the verdict’s wake, and the Justice Department piously debates retrying the four officers on civil rights charges, it might be time to ask black leaders to seek justice in one truly egregious civil rights abuse that they have so far chosen to ignore.

Church burning, as everyone remembers, seared its way into the American consciousness a few years back when one Southern black church after another went up in flames. Groups as diverse as CORE and the Christian Coalition rushed to the forefront to denounce the perpetrators and to comforrt the victims. .

What few remember, however, is the most infamous Southern church burning of them all. If no blacks died in that publicized string of arson fires, 28 blacks died in this one horrific inferno. Nor was this fire an act of God or nature. It was indisputably an act of man. Yet for a variety of reasons, none of them good, America has chosen to assign this holocaust to the ash heap of history, and even our civil rights leaders have conspired to keep it there.

Despite a recent month of Black History, not one student out of 100 could identify Mount Carmel, the name of this rural faith community. Its charismatic preacher attracted blacks from throughout America and throughout the world--the West Indies, Canada, even England. Indeed, the youngest of them to die in the fire was 6 year-old Melissa Morrison from Britian. The oldest was a 61 year-old African-American named Floyd Houtman. When the ashes cooled, a week after this all-consuming blaze, they were identifiable only by their teeth.

Nor was this fire, like most church burnings, the work of satanists, psychos, insurance scammers or sodden good old boys. It was caused either directly or indirectly by federal agents who had no use for a faith community as distinct and secure as this one.

For fifty years, this community had lived in harmony with its neighbors. Its members lived peaceful, prayerful lives. Even in retrospect, it is hard to know what set the Federal agents off. Some think it may have been the integrated nature of the community. Among the dead were Hawaians, Hispanics, Asians, even a minority of whites, a total of 80 in all.

More likely, it was the members’ expressed willingness to defend their community and their faith. Although its members owned no more guns than did the average Southerner, their collection in a community so unusual must have struck an historic nerve somewhere. Indeed, many of the nation’s gun control laws derive from the post Civil-war days when authorities hastened to deny guns to freed blacks.

To impress a new administration, the Feds decided to storm Mount Carmel, arrest its leaders and seize its guns. Some 75 agents in body armor with helicopter back up attacked the church and, by most reliable accounts, fired first. The church members fired back. The rest is history.

Almost. For strategic reasons, the Feds never showed publicly the tapes made by church members during the seige. As a result, the average citizen has no idea that the most of those 80 souls killed at this ramshackle church on the outskirts of Waco were minorities nor that 28 of them were black.

This event did not take place in the distant reaches of history. It took place in the first few months of the Clinton era. If Al Sharpton, Susan Sarandon and Jesse Jackson are looking for an abuse of police power to protest, they have to look no further than to their pals in the White House. No justice, no peace. Yea, right.